Intelligence in the Present, Always Embodied

If intelligence emerges – in the long time of the evolution of the species (phylogenesis) as well as in the shorter time of the evolution of the individual (ontogenesis) – from the gestural activity of the hand and the body, in its present functioning, at any given moment, it remains anchored in the materiality of the body. That of the brain, certainly, but not only: intelligence is also distributed over the whole of the human body, and beyond it, it also invests the materialities of nonhuman elements. This is what emerges from the work of Francisco Varela and his collaborators, crystallized in their essay L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit (1991).

Varela extends the research of Merleau-Ponty, who claims for the body – in which the fundamental place of perception stands out – the role of epicenter of human experience in the world, but also of support of cognitive activity:

For Merleau-Ponty, as for us, embodiment has this double sense: it encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms¹.

Thus, for Varela, consciousness lives through the body, but it also lives the body, which constitutes the central support of consciousness, a consciousness that is also distributed beyond the body proper. For Varela, consciousness is to be associated with the notion of the “lived world,” lived by a subject whose mode of existence is “fundamentally fragmented, divided, or nonunified²,” a vision with which this research is able to agree, including when cognitive activity is distributed beyond the human body.

This vision of the fragmented subject would tend to deconstruct the idea of a “mind” that would “reside” in the brain³. The fragmentation of the subject at issue here – a subject disseminated in an open ensemble that goes beyond the body, while remaining inscribed in matter – naturally weakens the vision of an essentialized “self,” suspending the salience of a strong ego.

Moreover, Varela introduces the notion of enaction, which implies that neither intelligence nor the world is predetermined: they arise within the organism from its experience of the world, in a framework that is therefore situated, and in which the role of perception is fundamental.

This framework upsets the expression of an objectivity and a subjectivity such as they would emerge from a conception that admits a clear subject/object separation. The calling into question of a “traditional” form of subjectivity (which echoes the apprehension of the artist as a unified subject) does not clash with the felt sense of a research such as this one, which could not entirely disregard artistic intentionality.

On the contrary, subjectivity thus “deconstructed” within the framework of enactivism enters into resonance with the vision of a plastic intentionality – which will be considered later in this chapter – that belongs to the artist and triggers the creative process, but that will come to evolve within the experiential framework in the course of which the work takes form.

Certain of Varela’s claims have been supported empirically by contemporary experiments in neuroscience. For example, the discovery of the functioning of mirror neurons – neurons that are activated when the individual performs an action, but also when they observe another individual performing it⁴ – invites us to consider a direct contact between perception and action, and suggests a form of embodied cognition that acts outside any symbolic representation. And it is precisely this obligatory passage through the representation of a pregiven world, in the functioning of cognition, that Varela criticizes in cognitivism⁵, the founding approach of the traditional cognitive sciences, which regards the functioning of human thought as an information-processing process comparable to that carried out by a computer.

The research of Antonio Damasio, for its part, has brought to light – on the basis of empirical studies of patients suffering from lesions of the prefrontal cortex – a link between human rational functioning and the capacity to restore emotional states, the latter being somatically rooted according to past experiences⁶. These studies reveal that the functioning of the human intellectual apparatus and the emotional-somatic component that guides decision-making are linked through the body: this is the so-called somatic marker hypothesis⁷. From this we deduce that the feeling body guides the thinking “mind,” bearing witness to the irreducible somatic rootedness of what has been understood as the activity of the mind.

Finally, an “open-brain” study conducted in 2009 on patients with brain tumors operated on under local anesthesia reports the appearance of intentions to move following direct stimulation of the cerebral cortex, as well as false memories, which supports the idea of an embodied consciousness⁸.

The conceptual framework proposed by Varela and his associates makes it possible to envisage intelligence, in its functioning in the present, as a faculty embodied within the human body (within its gestures, its movements), but also beyond it. The vision of a fragmented subject that emerges from it is consistent with the manifestation of an artistic intentionality of a plastic nature, in keeping with the felt sense that guides this research, provided we agree to maintain in the analysis the expression of a form of subjectivity. This subjectivity must be put into perspective: it is constrained, even partially “distributed,” to be sure, but it does not disappear, and it requires the artist as its vital epicenter.

1. Francisco J. Varela Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit: sciences cognitives et expérience humaine. Paris : Éd. du Seuil, 1993, p. 20.↩︎

2. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit : sciences cognitives et expérience humaine, op. cit., p. 23.↩︎

3. Let us note how the idea of a fragmented subject also undermines the project of cognitivism, a theory that envisages human consciousness as an entity with an exclusively symbolic functioning, which can be simulated by a computer. Varela considers the birth of this theory, out of the cybernetic ferment of the 1940s, at the beginning of the third chapter of L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit. See in this regard Ibid., p. 81 ff.↩︎

4. Giacomo Rizzolatti Luciano Fadiga Vittorio Gallese et al., «Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions ». Cognitive Brain Research [en ligne]. March 1996, vol. 3, n° 2, p. 131–141.↩︎

5. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit : sciences cognitives et expérience humaine, op. cit., p. 41.↩︎

6. See in this regard Antonio R. Damasio, L’erreur de Descartes: la raison des émotions. Nouvelle édition. Paris : Odile Jacob, 2010.↩︎

7. Ibid., p. II of the preface.↩︎

8. Michel Desmurget Karen T. Reilly Nathalie Richard et al., «Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans ». Science [en ligne]. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), May 2009, vol. 324, n° 5928, p. 811–813.↩︎